Next year will be a year of firsts, a year of new beginnings and a year for breaking new ground. In August, the Department of Computer Science will move its offices, labs and classrooms to the newly-renovated Cashion Academic Center and will open its doors to students enrolled in fall 2016 undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. computer science programs at Baylor.

The move out of the Rogers Engineering and Computer Science building will provide larger classrooms and additional lab and office space for the Department of Computer Science. In addition, the move will provide space for the engineering programs to expand within Rogers.

“This is a great move for the School as a whole," said Greg Speegle, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Computer Science. “The move will be something that computer science alumni can get excited about, and we encourage them to come back and visit campus to see the growth firsthand."

With the new space in Cashion, the computer science Ph.D. program will also have plenty of space to accommodate new faculty and additional graduate students.

“Currently, the computer science graduate program is in the process of actively recruiting high-quality undergraduate and master's level students who can excel at working on big, interesting, fundamental problems in computer science - both theoretical and applied," said Greg Hamerly, Ph.D., graduate program director for the Department of Computer Science.

The new Ph.D. program will be a research-intensive program where faculty will mentor and shepherd the students toward a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Dr. Hamerly believes that the work of Ph.D. students in interdisciplinary projects such as computational studies of political rhetoric, pediatric ocular cancer, biological signal pathways and biological markers for alcoholism will have a great impact on productivity across different industries.

In the long run, Dr. Hamerly would like to use the Ph.D. program to build stronger relationships with other Baylor departments as well as other universities to grow research productivity and grant funding. Although computer science is a collaborative field, the initial focus will be in the area of big data analytics - including bioinformatics, data mining, machine learning, algorithms, and databases.

We can’t wait to see how these exciting new opportunities will allow the Department of Computer Science to expand their influence across the world.